David Lynch and his love of smoking: a meditative yet deadly habit

David Lynch is now suffering from emphysema, after smoking since he was eight. Yet smoking is essential to understanding his art.

David Lynch, the legendary filmmaker behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks, has long been associated with a creative process steeped in mystery, discipline, and ritual. Among the many iconic elements of Lynch’s persona—his towering hair, his surreal storytelling, and his fascination with the subconscious—one habit has always stood out, pipping his love of coffee: his enduring love of smoking.

Now that the 78 year old film-maker has announced that he is suffering from emphysema, this love of his is taking on a different shade. This week he gave an update to People magazine saying he was diagnosed in 2020 but continued smoking until he was warned he could “die in a week.” Now he finds he has to use supplemental oxygen for anything strenuous: “I can hardly walk across a room. It’s like having a plastic bag over your head.”

Lynch uses Transcendental Meditation to help him cope – he has been a TM user since the 70s and is one of the world’s leading exponents of it – and has warned young people off smoking: “I really wanted to get this across: Think about it. You can quit these things that are going to end up killing you. I owe it to them — and to myself — to say that.”

But that said, he admitted smoking played a huge part in his life. “I don’t regret it. It was important to me. I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”

He went on: “A big important part of my life was smoking. I loved the smell of tobacco, the taste of tobacco. I loved lighting cigarettes. It was part of being a painter and a filmmaker for me.”

So while we can all endorse his warnings around smoking – and again, he did stress “It can bite you. I took a chance, and I got bit.” – we also have to understand what role it had for him and his art. It may have ended up putting him in seriously bad health but smoking is interesting with Lynch and to examine his relationship to it is important in getting to grips with his work.

Lynch’s relationship with smoking was more than just a casual indulgence; it always intertwined with his creative process, his aesthetic, and his worldview. For Lynch, smoking was not merely a habit—it’s an act of meditation, a rhythm that accompanied his thoughts and fuelled his creative fire.

While some of this may be steeped with irony in hindsight, any Lynch fan knows the role it has played…

In interviews over the years, Lynch has spoken candidly about his fondness for cigarettes. Smoking offered both a physical and mental space where ideas can flow freely. It wasn’t not unusual to hear him describe his creative process as one that requires both routine and openness. Smoking fit neatly into this ethos—a ritualistic activity that punctuated his day and provided moments of pause.

Lynch has described smoking as a kind of companion to his creativity. The repetitive motions—lighting a cigarette, inhaling, exhaling—seem to mirror the cyclical nature of his storytelling, where tension and release often play central roles. The act of smoking provides a rhythm, a tempo that parallels the deliberate pacing of his films. Lynch once said, “The cigarette is a friend—it’s always there when you need it.”

Much like his love of coffee, which he has called one of his essential “fuel sources,” smoking has been a constant presence in Lynch’s creative life. In his studio at home – known as The Pink House – where he spends hours painting, sculpting, or editing film, cigarettes have often been seen as extensions of his hands. Photos of Lynch at work often show him with a cigarette perched between his fingers or trailing smoke from an ashtray nearby.

It was part of what he called The Art Life. In his autobiography, Room to Dream, he said, “The art spirit sort of became the art life, and I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it. Maybe, maybe, girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.”

Lynch’s affinity for smoking extended beyond his personal habits and into the worlds he creates onscreen. Cigarettes are omnipresent in Lynchian cinema, often used to convey mood, character, or the passage of time. Think of characters like Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks smoking in rebellion. Or the chain-smoking Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart femme fatales in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, whose cigarettes seem to accentuate their allure and mystery.

The visual quality of smoke itself—its curling, ephemeral nature—also appeals to Lynch’s aesthetic sensibilities. Smoke is unpredictable, elusive, and fleeting, much like the dream logic that governs his films. Its movement can transform a mundane scene into something hauntingly beautiful, reflecting Lynch’s ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

For Lynch, smoking might act as a bridge to the subconscious. His work is famously preoccupied with the liminal spaces between the ordinary and the surreal, the conscious and the unconscious. Smoke is vital in films like The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive, a kind of curtain leading into another world.

In fact simply the shape of smoke he found beautiful. This was an artist who released a photography book called ‘Nudes and Smoke’.

Despite his love of smoking, Lynch is not oblivious to the shifting cultural attitudes toward cigarettes. Over the years, as smoking became less socially acceptable and health risks more widely acknowledged, Lynch made clear he wasn’t advocating for smoking, he just maintained a deeply personal attachment to it, viewing it as an integral part of his routine and identity rather than a reckless indulgence.

Now things have changed further and become much more serious for him, in the way they are putting limitations on him being able to follow up on his last work, the masterpiece Twin Peaks: The Return.

But in his films, smoking represents the interplay between the mundane and the sublime, the ritual and the spontaneous.

Can it be true that you can appreciate the work that came from the smoking, even though it is curtailing his activities now? It is a hard question, possibly a dangerous one. Nobody should take up smoking, particularly not to try and create great art.

But would Lynch have been equally great without the smoking? This is impossible to say, but one could honestly answer: yes. Because it came from the man, not the habit.